Playa Haters at “Blender”

The slaying of sacred cows to spike your Sitemeter stats is a given for blogs and websites nowadays. So, it should come as no surprise that Blender magazine has done their best to chum the waters with fresh blood and fishheads to attract our inner sharks with their list of the 40 Worst Lyricists In Rock. Now, to be fair, some of the lyricists should be on the list (Did someone say K-Fed and Paul Stanley from KISS?). However, the #1 and #2 slots are reserved for two of my favorite lyric writers: Sting and Neil Peart.

Here’s what they said about Peart:

02 Neil Peart
An ace on the rototoms, a train wreck on the typewriter.

Drummers are good at many things: exploding, drowning in their own vomit, drumming. But the Rush skinsman proved they should never write lyrics—or read books. Peart opuses like “Cygnus X-1” are richly awful tapestries of fantasy and science fiction, steeped in an eighth-grade understanding of Western philosophy. 2112, Rush’s 1976 concept album based on individualist thinker Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, remains an awe-inspiring low point in the sordid relationship between rock and ideas. Worst lyric: “I stand atop a spiral stair/An oracle confronts me there/He leads me on light years away/Through astral nights, galactic days” (“Oracle: The Dream”)

And then Sting gets his with this write up:

01 Sting
Mountainous pomposity, cloying spirituality, ham-handed metaphors: He can do it all.

After the Police split, Sting pursued a second career liberating soccer moms from their “soul cages.” Jazz musicians were involved. A lute was purchased. Volvo bumper stickers were quoted (“If you love someone, set them free”). Surveying the Cold War, he found the West “conditioned to respond to all the threats/In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets.” His rage at Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was so heated, he castigated the scoundrel in Spanish. Holy frijoles, was Sting mad!

These searing insights befit a sociopolitical seer “cursed with X-ray vision”—and capable of doing folkloric parables about seventh sons and mystical fisherman and taking us on journeys from the battlefields of World War I to the ancient kingdoms of “the high Sahara.” But does Sting care? He doth not. He’s the King of Pain, kids. And no pain, no gain.

I’m soooo annoyed, that I won’t even link to the list.  Suck it Blender!

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